[Repost] The Healthy Woman: A Complete Guide for all Ages

 

The Healthy Woman: A Complete Guide for all Ages | Publications.USA.gov.

Can be downloaded for free!

A comprehensive reference with helpful charts and personal stories. The guide covers major diseases, aging mental health, reproductive health, nutrition and alternative medicine. It also provices advice on common screening tests and immunizations you may need. (Previous item number: 107W)

Source: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
Released: 2008
Pages: 500

[Reblog] Food and health…again

Yes, this post is a bit left of center from most of my posts.
But it does raise some valid concerns.
The related articles are just a few ways some folks are trying their best to alert us and coax us into changing unhealthy food choices.

 

From the 23 August 2013 post at eek.ology

 

 

 

 

 

 

I found this on the image site imgur.com recently and it blew me away with its accuracy. I’m living in a country which seems to produce food largely based on fat, salt and sugar. I walk into the supermarket and have to check ingredients on cheese and yoghurt and jam and ice cream to avoid rBGH and high fructose corn syrup. I go to a pharmacy and they’re selling crisps and chocolate and cigarettes and booze. Things that were once simple aren’t anymore.  Once I just needed to worry about cage free eggs. Now I’m trying to toss up the environmental damage of the food miles of cheese from Europe vs. the health implications of local cheese from cows that have been treated with rBGH.

Wendell Berry is right. The connection between food and health (and indeed our environment), while it is so blatantly, blatantly obvious, is so frequently ignored.  We ignore what is in front of our noses in both the literal and metaphorical sense every single day, and our health is getting worse for it.

 

Some Related Organizations (variety of types & organizational values)

• Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics
• Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion
• Food and Drug Administration
• National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases
• Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI)
• EarthSave International 
• Vegetarian Resource Group (VRG)

 

Related articles

• 5 Worst Condiments you can use on your Foods (jilllindeman257.wordpress.com)
• Don’t Eat These, Ever (lewrockwell.com)
• 6 Easy Ways to Avoid GMO’s (jperaaho.wordpress.com)
• 10 Foods Sold in the U.S. That Are Banned Elsewhere (sweetjen101.wordpress.com)
• Gaining Control of Our Food – How to stand up to Big Corporate Food (spoonfeast.com)

The Future of Food?

FOOD, FACTS and FADS

 “What we eat has changed more in the past forty years than in previous forty thousand”.  Eric Schosser, Fast Food Nation

In the beginning of the 19^th century, the vast majority of Americans were farmers.  In the beginning of the 20^th century, most worked in factories. In the beginning of the 21^st century, the fastest growing segment of the economy was service jobs, especially in the food service industry. About fifty cents of every dollar Americans spent on food was spent in a restaurant, predominantly fast food.  Food preparation changed dramatically from home cooking to processed food, in other words, we relied on others more and more to cook our food for us.

 We evolved our sense of taste to help us survive – edible plants generally taste sweet – deadly ones bitter.  With the rise of processed and fast food, a new industry was born, the…

View original post 560 more words

Eating Wild: Foraging Safely in a Modern World

From the 8 March 2012 Science Daily article

In an expanding “foodie” culture, people go to great lengths to get the best ingredients, seek out the most aesthetic desserts, and buy natural and organic. Less noted, though, is the movement of “foragers”: people who “eat wild” on a regular basis, supplemented by naturally growing, edible plants for which they search in their local communities, whether urban or rural….

….

“People new to foraging have to be very careful. There are many plants and fungi that are poisonous or have parts that are poisonous,” she says. “Wild parsley looks a lot like poison hemlock, for example. The growing environment is also a factor, because plants will sequester toxins that are introduced to the soil or fall on their leaves, like pesticides.”

Snetselaar offers this advice to novice foragers:

1. Educate yourself. Photo guides and iPhone apps do not sufficiently show plants and their parts for those unfamiliar with vegetation to distinguish the subtle differences that prove a plant edible or poisonous. Instead, learn the terminology associated with classification and rely on a more academic guidebook that has diagrams and shows a plant’s relative size.

2. Learn from an expert. Taking a seasoned forager as a guide is a safer and more informative way to learn what to pick.

3. Forage in untainted environments. Though people have been known to forage in urban settings, be wary of vacant lots and roadsides, where unknown pollutants can lie both underneath the soil and on vegetation itself. Do not forage where fertilizers and weed killers have been used and always wash plants before eating.

4. Check ordinances in parks and protected lands. Many state and national parks do not allow visitors to disturb protected environments by removing plant life and endangering regrowth.

Related articles

• Balmy English winter a boon to forest foragers (csmonitor.com)
• Foragers Mia Andler, Kevin Feinstein, now authors (sfgate.com)
• Foraging for wild foods, at the Native Plant Society Thursday (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Introduction into Foraging (theforagingsquirrel.wordpress.com)
• Reap the benefits of wild edible plants – aka. FREE FOOD!! 🙂 (permacultureprocess.wordpress.com)
• Coming up: wild food foraging in the city (seattletimes.nwsource.com)

The Future Of Food: Algae, Insects and Lab-Grown Meat?

From the 3 February 2012 post at Art of the STEM – Science Art Culture Cohabitate

How can we feed the 2.5 billion more people – an extra China and India – likely to be alive in 2050? The UN says we will have to nearly double our food production and governments say we should adopt new technologies and avoid waste, but however you cut it, there are already one billion chronically hungry people, there’s little more virgin land to open up, climate change will only make farming harder to grow food in most places, the oceans are overfished, and much of the world faces growing water shortages.

Fifty years ago, when the world’s population was around half what it is now, the answer to looming famines was “the green revolution” – a massive increase in the use of hybrid seeds and chemical fertilisers. It worked, but at a great ecological price. We grow nearly twice as much food as we did just a generation ago, but we use three times as much water from rivers and underground supplies.

Food, farm and water technologists will have to find new ways to grow more crops in places that until now were hard or impossible to farm. It may need a total rethink over how we use land and water. So enter a new generation of radical farmers, novel foods and bright ideas…….

 

Related articles

• Can Algae Feed the World and Fuel the Planet? A Q&A with Craig Venter (scientificamerican.com)
• Environmental Benefits of lab-grown meat and genetically engineered fish (nextbigfuture.com)
• The future of food (foodsecuritysm.wordpress.com)
• Alternative Foods in Famines, by ShepherdFarmerGeek (survivalblog.com)
• Lab-Grown Meat: Food of the Future (foodservicewarehouse.com)
• Another helping of grasshopper? (msnbc.msn.com)

The entire approach to food based on nutrients is wrong

From an August 2011 article by  SHANTANU NUNDY, MD in KevinMD.com

The science of nutrition is changing and not in the way you might expect. After years of “reductionist” thinking — where food has been viewed as the sum of its parts – a call to treat food as food has been sounded. No more poring over nutrition labels to calculate grams of fat or chasing down the latest go-to chemical – be it vitamin E, fish oil or omega-3. Instead we are being asked to call a potato a potato and a piece of steak, well, a piece of steak…

Read the article

 

Related articles

• How Does Food Impact Health? (autoimmunephoenix.wordpress.com)

Food Environment Atlas / Food Desert Locator

The USDA’s Food Environment Atlas allows one to “get a spacial view of a community’s ability to access healthy food and its success in doing so”.

County level statistics can be viewed on food choices, health and well-being indicators, and community characteristics.

The Food Desert Locator identifies low-income census tracts where a substantial number or share of residents has low access to a supermarket or large grocery store. The interactive map is similar to the Food Environment Atlas.

Related articles

• USDA issues “food desert” locator (sfgate.com)
• California Food Deserts: Nearly 1 Million Live Far From Supermarkets, Grocery Stores (huffingtonpost.com)
• The food desert in your own backyard (eatocracy.cnn.com)
• USDA: Atlas of Rural and Small-Town America (ruralcommunitybuilding.fb.org)
• “Government Releases Food Desert Locator” and related posts (huffingtonpost.com)

New USDA Dietary Guidelines (released January 31, 2011)

The US Dept of Agriculture, Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion released Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2010.

Some excerpts from the Introduction

The ultimate goal of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans is to improve the health of our Nation’s current and future generations by facilitating and promoting healthy eatingand physical activity choices so that these behaviors become the norm among all individuals….

… The recommendations contained in the Dietary Guidelines for Americans traditionally have been intended for healthy Americans ages 2 years and older. However, Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2010 is being released at a time of rising concern about the health of the American population. Its recommendations accommodate the reality that a large percentage of Americans are overweight or obese and/or at risk of various chronic diseases. Therefore,the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2010 is intended for Americans ages 2 years and older, includingthose who are at increased risk of chronic disease….

…Dietary Guidelines for Americans also recognizes that in recent years nearly 15 percent of American households have been unable to acquire adequate food to meet their needs because of insufficient money or other resources for food.10 This dietary guidance can help them maximize the nutritional content of their meals within their resource constraints….

Chapters include Balancing Calories to Lose Weight, Foods and Food Components to Reduce, Foods and Nutrients to Increase, Building Health Eating Patterns, and Helping Americans Make Health Choices.

In the coming days and weeks, links will be added here to related news items, commentaries, and additional informational resources.

Links a few media news items (the author does not endorse the views in these links, they are provided for informational purposes only)

 

 

• New Nutrition Guidelines: Read Between The Lines On Red Meat (NPR)
• USDA releases updatedguidelines (Supermarket Guru)
• USDA And HHS Announce New Dietary Guidelines To Help Americans Make Healthier Food Choices And Confront Obesity Epidemic(MediLexicon)
• Foodmakers at work on healthier fare (StarTribune.com)
• Steady Diet of Nothing New (Bostone Globe)
• New Dietary Guidelines Show Politics Still Trumps Science (Time)
• American Society of Nephrology statement in support of US Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2010
• In the face of contradictory evidence: Report of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans Committee
• Free healthy diet plans – USDA Food Pyramid has a statement from Sally Fallon, President of The Weston A. Price Foundation and author of Nourishing Traditions regarding the USDA Food Pyramid and the new 2010 Dietary Guidelines. She basically says the USDA guidelines are wrong in promoting grains and “demoting” necessary saturated fats.

• Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2011/01/31/new-dietary-guidelines-show-politics-still-trumps-science/#ixzz1Churur3x

Related articles

• Whole Grains Are Better, But Refined Grains Aren’t Bad (healthland.time.com)
• You: USDA food pyramid now a plate-shaped dietary guide (menafn.com)

10 Tips to Get Your Kids to Eat Vegetables and Fruits

From the American Heart Association Web page

In a new study, children who ate the most vegetables and fruits had significantly healthier arteries as adults than children who ate the fewest.  Here are 10 tips to encourage your children to eat more vegetables and fruits.

1.   Make fruit and vegetable shopping fun: Visit your local green market and/or grocery store with your kids, and show them how to select ripe fruits and fresh vegetables. This is also a good opportunity to explain which fruits and vegetables are available by season and how some come from countries with different climates.

2.   Involve kids in meal prep: Find a healthy dish your kids enjoy and invite them to help you prepare it. Younger kids can help with measuring, crumbling, holding and handing some of the ingredients to you. Older kids can help by setting the table. Make sure you praise them for their help, so they feel proud of what they’ve done.

3.   Be a role model: If you’re eating a wide range of fruits and vegetables — and enjoying them — your child may want to taste. If you aren’t eating junk food or keeping it in your home, your kids won’t be eating junk food at home either.

4.   Create fun snacks: Schedule snack times — most kids like routines. Healthy between-meal snacks are a great opportunity to offer fruits and vegetables. Kids like to pick up foods, so give them finger foods they can handle. Cut up a fruit and arrange it on an attractive plate. Make a smoothie or freeze a smoothie in ice cube trays. Create a smiley face from cut-up vegetables and serve with a small portion of low-fat salad dressing, hummus or plain low-fat yogurt. A positive experience with food is important. Never force your child to eat something, or use food as a punishment or reward.

5.   Give kids choices — within limits: Too many choices can overwhelm a small child. It’s too open ended to ask, “What would you like for lunch?” It may start a mealtime meltdown. Instead, offer them limited healthy choices, such as choosing between a banana or strawberries with their cereal, or carrots or broccoli with dinner.

6.   Eat together as a family: If your schedules permit, family dining is a great time to help your kids develop healthy attitudes about food and the social aspects of eating with others.  Make sure you are eating vegetables in front of your children. Even if they aren’t eating certain vegetables yet, they will model your behavior.

7.   Expect pushback: As your kids are exposed to other families’ eating habits, they may start to reject some of your healthy offerings. Without making a disparaging remark about their friends’ diet, let your children know that fruits and vegetables come first in your family.

8.   Grow it: Start from the ground up — create a kitchen garden with your child and let them plant tomatoes and herbs, such as basil and oregano in window boxes. If you have space for a garden, help them cultivate their own plot and choose plants that grow quickly, such as beans, cherry tomatoes, snow peas and radishes. Provide child-size gardening tools appropriate to their age.

9.   Covert operations: You may have tried everything in this list and more, yet your child’s lips remain zipped when offered a fruit or vegetable. Try sneaking grated or pureed carrots or zucchini into pasta or pizza sauces. Casseroles are also a good place to hide pureed vegetables. You can also add fruits and vegetables to foods they already enjoy, such as pancakes with blueberries, carrot muffins or fruit slices added to cereal. On occasions when you serve dessert, include diced fruit as an option.

10. Be patient: Changes in your child’s food preferences will happen slowly. They may prefer sweet fruits, such as strawberries, apples and bananas, before they attempt vegetables. Eventually, your child may start trying the new vegetable. Many kids need to see and taste a new food a dozen times before they know whether they truly like it. Try putting a small amount of the new food — one or two broccoli florets — on their plate every day for two weeks; but don’t draw attention to it.